Former Mike Leach assistants and players keep cropping up all over the place in the modern college scene. Sonny Cumbie has the TCU offense humming again, Lincoln Riley has looked capable in taking over for Bob Stoops, and Neal Brown’s Troy just put took down LSU in Baton Rouge.
How an underdog non-power coached by a former Mike Leach wide receiver bullied LSU in Death Valley
The Troy Trojans clearly surprised the Tigers, both with their willingness to make the game a physical contest and with their ability to win that contest.
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Like the better coaches of the air raid tradition, he’s proved to be a creative mind and effective teacher more so than a strict acolyte of the passing-intensive offense that Leach made famous. Troy’s victory over LSU didn’t look like one of Leach’s upsets from back in the day (or this year), but instead featured good defense and a physical run game.
LSU didn’t look at all ready for the style Brown’s Trojans brought into Death Valley. Here’s how the Trojans caught them by surprise.
1. Troy set the tone of the game early on.
A couple of plays in the initial drives reversed expectations. One of the most crucial came on LSU’s first play:
The design of the Troy defense was to deploy safeties and linebackers on the edge to keep the Tigers from outflanking with jet sweeps, but that nearly backfired here, when those extra defenders weren’t in place to make a stop in the interior gaps.
Fortunately, safety Cedarius Rookard came straight down and brought the lumber, standing up RB Nick Brossette and knocking the ball out for a teammate to recover. That set the Trojans up to start on the LSU 30-yard line. Then they continued the physical play:
The double team by left guard Kirk Kelley (6’4, 310-pound sophomore from Louisiana) and center Deontae Crumitie (6’2, 296-pound junior from Florida) drove nose tackle Greg Gilmore off the ball while RB Jordan Chunn (6’1, 235-junior from Alabama) ran through for a six-yard gain.
They finished this drive with a short run for a score.
2. Troy kept surprising LSU with play calls, but also with physicality.
The lead went to 10-0 thanks largely to a pair of screen passes, the first on a third-and-one, when LSU was clearly expecting another inside run to big Chunn:
They have a big, 6’3, 221-pound receiver in Clark Quisenberry blocking for this bubble screen while another slips outside to secure the outside edge. The Tigers look confused, firing strong safety Grant Delpit off the edge in apparent anticipation of a zone read. The same play, a few minutes later on third-and-10, secured another first down.
With a 10-0 lead after the half, the Trojans started with a counter run they hadn’t shown yet in the game, which really caught LSU unawares.
The speedy secondary ran Chunn down on the one yard line, but it was 17-0 shortly after. This wasn’t an exotic play call, but the Tigers got mauled. The nickel was totally screened off by the slot receiver, the late-arriving backside linebacker was taken for a ride by the H-back, and the safeties come in hot but clueless.
The drive that made it 24-7 included several option schemes the Trojans hadn’t shown earlier in the game.
Both plays include confusion by freshman safety Delpit and examples of the Tigers getting shoved around. Were they expecting to be playing a soft spread team, perhaps? The Tigers were clearly surprised by both the Trojans’ choices and the ferocity with which they were executed.
3. LSU didn’t have enough firepower to make a comeback.
After a dominating victory over BYU in the season opener, it appeared the Tigers had a strong formula. They combined another athletic and precise Dave Aranda defense with a ground-and-pound offense that had a million ways to run the football. The combination of great defense and ball control was theoretically going to make it hard for any opponent to score enough to force the Tigers to throw.
Once the game came down to the Tigers executing in the passing game, they were really in trouble against Troy’s multiple defense.
Nowadays, college defenses are heavily influenced by Rex Ryan’s philosophy of using disguise and blitzing specific formations. With so many good passing attacks, defenses tend to spend the time to develop complex nickel and dime packages.
Meanwhile, a team like LSU has to spend practice time working out its run game, perhaps to the detriment of mastering blitz pickup, protections, audibles, route adjustments, and all the other techniques necessary to counter pro-style defense. The line’s slide protection was clearly not called to stop this well-disguised corner blitz, and Troy was also playing two-deep coverage, so there weren’t easy hot routes for Danny Etling to hit.
He looked to the field, where he found linebackers dropping into the hot zones and a safety sitting on the deeper route to the sticks, then back to the boundary, to find a CB blitzing in his face and bracket safety over his receiver.
Etling made a game effort and got the Tigers within a field goal but also committed some costly turnovers.
LSU generally looked like a fish out of water, trying to make a comeback throwing route combinations from spread sets into disguised, two-deep coverages behind blitzes.
It’s a hard-knock life for a blue blood program trying to win with old-fashioned run game and defense. Smaller programs are investing more in their programs and frequently have teams filled with upperclassmen who have been trained to execute modern schemes.
Troy came out with a plan to stop the LSU run game, build a lead, and make the Tigers come back while playing left-handed. It was barely enough to get the W in Death Valley, but it was more than enough to send another message about parity and the potential of yet another member of the Leach tree.
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